In article <2004Dec6.140130.25883 at jarvis.cs.toronto.edu>, bae at cs.toronto.no-uce.edu wrote:
>In article <31duhtF378em1U1 at individual.net>,
>Phred <ppnerkDELETETHIS at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>>One of the local supermarkets has recently been flogging another type
>>of yam and, judging by how clean the things are, I suspect they might
>>actually be edible aerial tubers in this case. Pale buff skin and
>>pure white flesh with even a suggestion of translucence. The texture
>>is light and crisp -- rather "refreshing" eaten raw, but bugger all
>>flavour. (Rather like the tubers of _Pachyrhizus tuberosa_ in fact.)
>>Could be jicama, P. erosus, which is in the Fabaceae, or maybe P.erosus
>is really P.tuberosus, with the error propagated around the web. At any
>rate it's a popular vegetable in Mexico and adjacent parts of the US and
>answers this description, especially if it's sort of vertically flattened.
>Recently it's become popular as a salad ingredient in California new
>cuisine, so the yuppies are creating a demand for it, and it's in all the
>supermarkets here.
Yeah. They are "sort of vertically flattened", so maybe they are as
you suggest. I've only eaten _P. tuberosa_ tubers dug out of a local
yard, and they were pretty dirty. :-) So I rather assumed these
really clean things from the supermarket must have been an aerial
organ, and we had been discussing _Dioscorea_ "bulbils" around the
smoko table not long before. (In fact a colleague had brought some in
for us to try -- from a form known to be edible of course. 8-)
>There seem to be a lot of Dioscorea yam cultivars. I don't know if they
>are all D.batatas. There are a lot of people in Toronto from the West
>Indies and Central America, and the supermarkets carry yams of many types
>and colors. All the ones I've seem have been sort of rough and shaggy,
>not smooth as you describe. There are probably culinary differences since
>stores normally carry several kinds if they carry any.
Cheers, Phred.
--
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